Is it bad practice to output from within a function?

Posted by Nick on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by Nick
Published on 2012-09-13T09:35:05Z Indexed on 2012/09/13 9:50 UTC
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For example, should I be doing something like:

<?php
function output_message($message,$type='success') {
  ?>
  <p class="<?php echo $type; ?>"><?php echo $message; ?></p>
  <?php
}
output_message('There were some errors processing your request','error');
?>

or

<?php
function output_message($message,$type='success') {
  ob_start();
  ?>
  <p class="<?php echo $type; ?>"><?php echo $message; ?></p>
  <?php
  return ob_get_clean();
}
echo output_message('There were some errors processing your request','error');
?>

I understand they both achieve the same end result, but are there benefits doing one way over the other? Or does it not even matter?

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